Transcript

00:00:02

>> Reuters interviews painting a picture of crucial mistakes by Bangladesh police during last week's Islamist attack in the capital Dhaka. Officials say they shot and killed the pizza chef of a restaurant thinking he was one of the militants who killed 20 people. Authorities also describing what amounts to a slow response from security agencies who misread warnings of an attack on the day of the assault.

00:00:23

Reuters Aditya Kalra has been speaking to a political adviser to the prime minister.>> The political adviser told us that on the day of the attack there were some messages on Twitter threatening an attack on the area where the attack finally took place. But there were several other messages that confused them.

00:00:39

When the security agencies read those messages, they started shutting shops, especially in and around the Western Hotel, which is a famous hotel there. They could never see that the attackers would go to that cafe. Though the political advisers said that seems to be a likely target because that was a famous cafe frequented by foreigners and they were just not prepared for it.

00:01:00

That's again a part of the investigation, that why they just missed the early warning signs on social media despite having such a good tracking mechanism.>> A police report seen by Reuters shows that officers launched a failed attempt to take out attackers Friday night, then held off for eight hours after gunfire and grenades injured at least 30 police.

00:01:19

The push that freed surviving hostages wouldn't be launched until after daybreak. Authorities have named five gunmen so far, down from an earlier six, mistakenly counting the pizza chef. At least three of them came from wealthy liberal families and went to elite schools in the capital, a contrast to the typical path from poverty to militant violence in Bangladesh.